


There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, M/M, References to Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-14
Updated: 2012-04-14
Packaged: 2017-11-03 15:44:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dirk and Roxy: best friends, soulmates, lifemates, could-have-beens and bodies to hold onto late at night.<br/>They are not lovers: they could never be.<br/>They are each other's lifeline, each other's sanity, each other's hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Daisy (daisyfairy on tumblr) and her wonderful butt for giving me the idea to write this! Molte grazie! u w u

It's raining and she doesn't care.

It's raining and she can't even bring herself to listen to the raindrops hitting the window, and her mind immediately scolds her because the thought of not listening to something that you can't switch off is a ridiculous thought.

After all, the rain is  _there_ and it's not going anywhere and there's no way she can not listen to it that doesn't entail standing up and dragging herself across the room and putting a record on, and it's something that, right here and now, she is perfectly uncapable of doing.  


She is broken and she does not care - she hasn't cared for hours and days and weeks and months. Years, even, which to her are nohing but fleeting promising moments that have danced right before her eyes without her making a single effort to reach out and grab them.  


Sometimes she wishes she could climb out the bottle and into the sunlight but she's lost all will to do that, too, and in truth she's always known she's never had the guts to pick herself up. She toppled in deep far too young, her blood is wine and her rage is sadness, there used to be something vaguely similar to hope but that's been burned out by old jazz standards playing a lifetime ago, sunlight cascading through drawn drapes, mothers made of ice and stone, razor-sharp kisses scarring cheeks.

She's fallen and she can't get up although the phone's rung God knows how many times, although she hasn't eaten and the world itself swims before her eyes.

The soft  _thump_  of her body hitting the floor echoes for a little bit in her ears, and then there's quiet for a little more until the phone screams loud and tears at her brain, paints her eyes red with pain. 

The rain starts at a certain point and melts into the greyness of her apartment. She wills her muscles to move and they do so for as long as it takes for her to crawl into a fetal position, knees tight against her chest. Then, they stop, and it feels as if blood has stopped pumping.   


She can see a power socket, the legs of her coffee table, old books (there's even one written by her mother, a book she's torn the pages out of and erased words, burned the cover off, desecrated the black and white portrait of a woman whom had taken the task upon herself to bring her into this world and then abandon her), the kitchen far down the hall. There is a cat somewhere asking to be fed but it is a marginal sound, something she does not want to pay attention to but can't help doing just that - and it is very much like trying to will herself to do something she knows she will never be able to do. Like stop listening to rain.  
  
The phone rings once more (or has it always been ringing?): red hot blast, she moans and the sheer desperation of her hopeless condition makes it unable for her to say a single word, and every concept she can bring herself to imagine is stuck in her throat and makes it hard to swallow.  


An hour that could just as well be a month goes by and then someone rings the doorbell and then there is quiet again and she blesses the quiet that fills her nose and brain with cotton.  


He has a copy of her house keys, the same way she has a copy of his. There is a slight click, and then her front door opens. It bangs against her back and she realizes she's fallen right in front of the door. Her brain scolds at her for doing such a foolish and impratical thing, and she knows she hears her mother's voice yelling.  


"Roxanne?"

His voice is soft like it always is, warm honey never meant for her and yet she is always in the back of his mind, lingering like the lover she never was and never could have been.  


"Roxy?"  


He pushes the door and it hurts her. He looks down.  


She's thirty-five and she's curled up on the floor and she smells of vodka. She used to be beautiful, blonde, smart. Funny.

He sighs.  


"Hey, baby girl."  


"I fell." and it's true.

"It's okay."

"I couldn't get up." and it's true, too.

"I know, sweetie pie."

Her own voice is a voice she does not recognize, and she realizes that she's been curled up on the floor for a week. 

She has wasted a week away, wrapped in a stupor that is both liquor and sadness induced. If she had the energy to do so, she would laugh at her own stupidity. 

"Darling - she knows Dirk has moved, sat down and twisted his arm through the door so that it rests on her hip - Roxy, sweety. Please move. So I can get in."

It is both a question and something he's said so many times he doesn't ask anymore. He just says it.

This is their routine, this is their ritual. They pick up the broken pieces the other one has left behind.

The amount of energy it takes her to will her entire carcass to move just enough so that he can slither in is unimaginable and life-draining.

He smiles (a devastating, desperate, helpless smile) as he sits next to her and lets her rest her head in his lap. He starts playing with her golden hair.

It twists and flows through his fingers. She closes her eyes and feeling Dirk's rough hand against her cheek is enough to let her breathe again.

"I fucked up, Dirk." she slurs. 

"You fuck up every time and then you always manage to drag yourself back together."

She tries to snort out a laugh and shakes her head.

It's a lie: she's in so deep she can't even see the light anymore.

But it's one of those lies Dirk says because it makes the truth a little more bearable.

"And you're still the prettiest girl I know."

Her best friend presses his lips - soft lips, gentle lips - against her forehead, and h e cradles her, and they don't speak after that, just listen to the house breathe.

It's raining.

She cares.

*

He is absence that is everything and absence that is zero. He is the nothingness condensed into one gesture and into the single thought that catches you by the throat all of a sudden and drags you down and traps you in your bed where you become embedded into your desperation, a desperation that has kept hidden in folds and not-theres and words that should be spoken but aren't.

He is curled up in his bed and he cannot get up because there is a half of him that has been cut out of his heart and burned right before his eyes. He is curled up in his bed and something is missing and has been missing for the last six months but it has hit him just now: Jake is gone and there is burnt and charred photographs in his place and a note he hasn't had the guts to read yet.

Jake is gone and he's dripped away down the drain, crimson and liquid and dead, bloody quietness Dirk hadn't been able to notice until it was too late and he'd screamed his name until his throat had seemed to sink into his stomach, until the sound of his voice was nothing but a raspy murmur that swallowed him whole.

Jake is _dead_  and there is no other way to put it. He has functioned perfectly (without feeling a thing that wasn't emptiness) for the last one-hundred and eighty days and now something has happened that has kicked him in the jaw and punched him in the belly and he is buried deep beneath the covers, unable to cry. There is a ton of lead crushing his chest, pinning him down and making every movement feel poisonous, every breath taste wrong.

He does not dare speak.

Jake had come to him in a dream and that is what drove him to his knees. The taste of Jake and the smell of Jake and hearing Jake giggle in his ear, _becoming_  each other's body, feeling him breathe.

Beautiful Jake, splendid Jake, _alive_  Jake, Jake before he became gray green eyes and quietness that stretched on for days. The Jake he can't even remember, the Jake he wasn't able to save.

Jake is gone, his side of the bed is cold and untouched and made, someone made their bed when Dirk wasn't home but nobody's been in that house for weeks except for him.

There is a heartbeat in his mind that tells him he himself remade the bed, but it is something that all of a sudden has become so distant from what he is and from his world that it scares him deeper into the hole than any notion of his loss ever could.

Deep down, he does not want to crawl out of it: here, encased in this fabricated memory of Jake, seconds tick by excruciatingly slow, painful, sweet, gone.

He feels tiny and frail compared to the enormity of this pain, this pain that has been blocked out for so long he is unable to fully comprehend it, this pain that has grown to such size he is unable to fight it. 

He knows that the phone has rang and rang and rang: but it is in another room, light years away from him.

Dirk lies perfectly still and feels waves upon waves of nothingness wash over him.

He lies quiet, too scared to even breathe, as days bleed into nights and nights into hours, long endless hours that are broken by speckles of dust shining golden in what little light slithers through the closed blinds.

Old picture frames sparkle: an older brother he never calls stares back at him, and somewhere deep behind the pain guilt and resentment both mingle. If he could, he'd stand up and smash the frame, cry at it, break down. Blame it all on him. 

But the fact that Jake is gone cannot be blamed on memories of an absent brother, on long quiet evenings spent alone, on feeling inadequate, forever. Always.

He has disappeared from the world, trapped in Jake and nothingness: he realizes this as another day flutters by. He hasn't moved, and he can almost read words shining bright on the ceiling. He feels the whirring in his mind quiet down.

Maybe he's going mad.

She lets herself in on the third day, thin with worry, sick with panic.

He knows she's walked into the room because he smells her: roses, cheap alcohol, cigarettes.

It is a poignant taste that, together with Jake's smell (that was dirt, old books and freshly cut grass) means _home_ to him in two very different ways. 

She stops right next to the bed. He needs her to speak as much as he needs her to keep quiet.

"Hey there, Dirk."

"He's gone."

The raspiness of his voice scares them both.

She sighs. It is the truth, and she feels helpless because there's no sugar-coating it. This isn't feeling inadequate, feeling lost, feeling lonely. This isn't drinking yourself into oblivion, this isn't cutting your hand punching mirrors and glass windows.

This is death with nobody dying and it scares her. 

She wishes to lie to him, tell him Jake's still there, tell him they didn't bury Jake one sunny September afternoon. 

But she can't.

" _Hold me_?"

Even his voice sounds tiny and lost. The weight of his world has come crashing down - it was something bound to happen neither of them were ready for.

It is tragically disarming.

She crawls into bed next to him, something they've done many times over the course of the years they've known each other. 

He lets himself sink against her.

Her heart beating against his back, the warmth of her forehead against the back of his head. Her arms latch around his hips.

Dirk feels air get crushed out of his lungs as he lets himself wail. 

He cries, she wipes every tear.

He shudders and shakes and sobs, and the stillness of the days before explodes into this roaring basin of neverending anguish. Jake is gone and there is nothing he can do about it, but letting it go now means that the pain will numb earlier, that the pain will maybe let him live.

Roxy holding him means that Jake will always be there and will always mean empty, but Roxy holding him also means that even the deepest gash can scar over, and the scar is proof he's fought and made it out alive.

She soothes him as the wailing quiets down, as the acid that is his tears is wiped away. 

They don't speak much after that. 

And suddenly, he is slightly whole again.


End file.
